Up the Kalamazoo with Enbridge (BP North) CEO Pat Daniel and Tar Sands Northern Gateway P

Up the Kalamazoo with Enbridge (BP North) CEO Pat Daniel and Tar Sands Northern Gateway Pipeline


UPDATE 1-US regulators demand fix for failed pipeline
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2912583920100730
Thu Jul 29, 2010 9:21pm EDT
 Enbridge had been warned by US in January on safety
By Bernie Woodall

DETROIT, July 29 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators have told Canada's Enbridge (ENB.TO) to detail a safety and repair plan for a failed oil pipeline in Michigan after warning in January the company appeared to be in violation of safety standards because it was not monitoring rust in the 41-year-old-pipe.
The order from the U.S. Department of Transportation was sent on Wednesday and raises the stakes in an oil spill that sent sent some 19,500 barrels of crude into a Michigan river...
The Enbridge spill follows the devastating BP Plc (BP.L) spill in the Gulf of Mexico and has been watched with concern in part because of its threat to Lake Michigan, part of the largest supply of fresh water on the planet...

Enbridge Chief Executive Patrick Daniel said the company was convinced that the was "no further oil leaking," but he declined to give an estimate of when the repair work would be done and the pipeline would be cleared to resume operation.
"We have a huge job in front of us. There is no doubt about that," he said.
Enbridge said it had tested the failed section of the pipeline for corrosion and cracking in 2009. The area that leaked had not been identified out for repair, it said.
EPA officials overseeing the cleanup of an estimated 820,000 gallons of oil hoped to contain the damage at Morrow Lake, just east of Kalamazoo.
"We do not anticipate that Lake Michigan is at risk," Ralph Dollhopf, the on-scene coordinator for the EPA told reporters.
Tom Sands, a Michigan state police captain overseeing Michigan's emergency response, said he had seen what appeared to be oil floating on the surface of Morrow Lake and challenged the EPA's account of its success.
"I saw the sheen. I photographed the sheen," he told reporters. "Did I test it? No."
Sands said he had reported to Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm that the early response to the spill appeared to be "wholly inadequate" to prevent the oil from heading further down the Kalamazoo River system toward Lake Michigan.
"This is a serious situation and we need more resources," he said.
Granholm has declared a disaster for the area along the Kalamazoo River.
Enbridge CEO apologizes for Michigan oil spill

JULY 29, 2010

BATTLE CREEK - More than 1,000 barrels, or about 42,000 gallons, of crude oil has been recovered from the Kalamazoo River, according to Enbridge Inc., the company responsible for the spill.

The Battle Creek Enquirer is reporting the recovered oil is being measured and stored to determine how much oil originally spilled in the river from an Enbridge pipeline near the Marshall and Fredonia townships line. The company still estimates that about 19,500 barrels, or 819,000 gallons, flowed into the river earlier this week.
The president of Enbridge apologized today “for the mess we have made.”
Enbridge President Patrick Daniel said the company takes “full responsibility for the cleanup,” during an afternoon press conference in Battle Creek on the spill and cleanup process.
He and EPA officials said no oil has entered Morrow Lake. An EPA official said there is no danger to Kalamazoo.
That contradicts earlier reports from Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Comstock Township official and at least one lakeside homeowner that oil had in fact reached Lake Morrow.
Did Enbridge know about leak on Sunday?
Officials have said they learned of leak Monday
http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/local/kalamazoo_and_battle_creek/Did-Enbridge-know-about-leak-on-Sunday
Updated: Thursday, 29 Jul 2010, 6:18 AM EDT

By Henry Erb

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - People in the Marshall area started smelling something in the air Sunday night, although Enbridge officials have said they didn't know there was a leak until Monday morning.
A citizen complaint sent the Marshall Township Fire Department out to try and discover what was causing the odor.
When officials arrived near the location of the leak, they found a pick-up truck with an Enbridge employee parked there, said Fire Chief Steve Riggs. The firefighters talked with him about the petroleum odor in the air and the man told them he thought it was coming from a Clark oil facility nearby, Riggs said.
Unable to find anything, the firefighters went home.
What was that Enbridge worker doing near the spill site around 11 p.m. Sunday? It raises the question of whether the company knew something about the spill the night before it said it did.

Past problems for company at heart of oil spill
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hbazNv8HPBELUpCXxcRQmCxaO3DgD9H911C80

By TIM MARTIN and DAVID RUNK (AP) – 6 hours ago

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. — A Canadian company whose pipeline leaked hundreds of thousands of oil into a Michigan river boasts on its website of being "an industry leader in pipeline safety and integrity."
A decade's worth of leaks, an explosion and regulatory violations throughout the Great Lakes region and elsewhere in the U.S. suggest otherwise.
Enbridge Inc. or its affiliates have been cited for 30 enforcement actions since 2002 by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration — the U.S. Department of Transportation's regulatory arm.

In a warning letter sent Jan. 21, the agency told the company it may have violated safety codes by improperly monitoring corrosion in the pipeline responsible for the massive spill Monday in Talmadge Creek, a waterway in Calhoun County's Marshall Township that flows into the Kalamazoo River.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimated the spill at more than 1 million gallons of oil, saying it had traveled 25 miles downstream. The state estimates it has traveled 35 miles. Gov. Jennifer Granholm warned of a "tragedy of historic proportions" should it travel an additional 80 miles and reach Lake Michigan and the vacation communities that depend on it.

Steve Wuori, an Enbridge executive vice president, said the company was doing maintenance all along the pipeline, but the section at the leak site was not scheduled for replacement.
After being criticized for dragging their feet in their initial response to the Monday spill, company officials have pushed the message that they're doing all they can to clean and contain it. Enbridge CEO Patrick D. Daniel again apologized Thursday to the residents of Calhoun County "for the mess that we have made" to the river and nearby properties.

"We take full responsibility and we will be here until you are happy in this community," Daniel said. "We still have a huge job in front of us, there's no doubt about that."
On Thursday, hundreds of workers and contractors went to work on the oil with more than 12,000 feet of containment and absorption boom, 14 skimmers, 43 vacuum trucks and a number of tanker trucks, excavators and other trucks, Enbridge said.
Health officials went door-to-door to advise residents in about 30 to 50 homes near the spill to evacuate because of air quality concerns, Calhoun County health official Jim Rutherford said. He said health officials were advising residents of about 100 homes near the river that use well water to use bottled water for drinking and cooking.
The slick, which emits a noxious, unpleasant odor, has killed fish and coated other wildlife in oil...

According to the Jan. 21 warning, Enbridge was implementing an alternate way of monitoring corrosion in the pipeline, and had detailed to regulators the steps it was taking to track corrosion in the interim.

But the agency warned the company in the letter that it was violating code by not using a sufficient amount of certain chemicals used to protect pipe interiors, not using proper monitoring equipment to determine if those chemicals were working, and not examining its monitoring equipment at least twice a year.

"The transition from one technology to another must be implemented in a manner that ensures continued compliance with the regulations," the agency wrote.
Two years ago, Enbridge was cited for committing eight probable violations that may have contributed to an explosion that killed two people working Nov. 28, 2007, on a 34-inch pipeline near Clearbrook, Minn. Among its findings, the regulatory agency found Enbridge failed to follow written procedures for couplings on the pipeline, didn't make the repairs in a safe manner and didn't make sure workers had adequate training for that job.

Jeff Share, editor of the Pipeline & Gas Journal, said violations like those Enbridge was cited for aren't uncommon for pipeline companies.
"It is purely a pipeline company. If they're not operated safely, they don't make any money," Share said. "It pays for them from a business and social perspective that their pipelines operate as efficiently and safely as possible."
An Enbridge affiliate, Houston-based Enbridge Energy Co., spilled almost 19,000 gallons of crude oil onto Wisconsin's Nemadji River in 2003. An additional 189,000 gallons of oil spilled at the company's terminal two miles from Lake Superior, though most was contained.

In 2007, two spills released about 200,000 gallons of crude in northern Wisconsin as Enbridge was expanding a 320-mile pipeline. The company also was accused of violating Wisconsin permits designed to protect water quality during work in and around wetlands, rivers and streams, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said. The violations came during construction of a 321-mile, $2 billion oil pipeline across that state. Enbridge agreed to pay $1.1 million in 2009.
The Michigan leak came from a 30-inch pipeline, which was built in 1969 and carries about 8 million gallons of oil daily from Griffith, Ind., to Sarnia, Ontario...

.. Andy Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Great Lakes office, said Enbridge has a history of spills — including two major leaks in the past year. He said those leaks, coupled with the fatal blast in Minnesota, are problematic.
"This is a company whose safety record is very definitely suspect and cause for concern," Buchsbaum said.

Runk reported from Detroit. Associated Press writers Corey Williams and Mike Householder in Detroit contributed to this report.

Pipeline leak deals blow to Canada's oil sands industry
Financial Times - Bernard Simon - ‎7 hours ago‎
Canada's oil sands industry was trying to defuse a fresh public relations headache on Thursday after a ruptured pipeline spilled about 4m litres of Alberta crude into waterways in southern Michigan. Lisa Jackson, head of the ...

Greenpeace mocks oil spill in protest at Enbridge Vancouver office

Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/entertainment/Greenpeace+mocks+spill+protest+Enbridge+Vancouver+office/3333648/story.html#ixzz0v8tWN3Pp

By Lena Sin, The Province July 29, 2010


Greenpeace activists occupied pipeline giant Enbridge's downtown Vancouver office Wednesday, demanding the company withdraw its proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline project.

The demand came two days after an Enbridge pipeline burst in Michigan, causing a massive oil spill and triggering a state of emergency — and about two months after the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
The four Greenpeace activists chained themselves to the door of the sixth-floor office at Burrard and West Pender, and used oil they said came from the Gulf of Mexico to scrawl "BC Next" on the glass entrance doors.
"A big part of the message we're trying to get across today is that further exploitation of fossil-fuel resources is going to pose serious threat to our coast. We don't want to see what happened in the Gulf of Mexico in B.C.," said Christine Leclerc, one of the four.
Leclerc, 30, a University of B.C. creative-writing adjunct professor, has been a Greenpeace volunteer for three years. She said the takeover of Enbridge's office was necessary to get their message across.
Enbridge is proposing in its Northern Gateway project to build two pipelines that would bring crude oil from Alberta to Kitimat on B.C.'s central coast, where crude oil will then be loaded on tankers destined for Asia. If built, the pipelines flowing both east and west could carry each day a total of 525,000 barrels of oil and 193,000 barrels of condensate (a petroleum byproduct used to thin tar-sands bitumen).
Greenpeace and First Nations groups seized on Monday's massive oil spill in Michigan as a prime example of the dangers that the Northern Gateway pipeline poses in B.C.
In Michigan, a broken Enbridge pipeline has leaked an estimated 819,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River as of Wednesday.
Coastal First Nations, an alliance of nine major aboriginal groups, staunchly opposes the Northern Gateway project, saying that an oil spill on B.C.'s coast would wipe out the marine life on which they depend heavily.
Rob Fleming, the NDP environment critic opposed to the project, said the proposed pipelines would cross 800 freshwater sources, putting B.C.'s pristine wilderness at risk.
Alan Roth, Enbridge spokesman on the project, admitted there is no guarantee that what happened in Michigan will not happen in B.C., but emphasized the probability is small.
"I think people confuse possibility with probability ... The probability of a pipeline accident based on Enbridge's program for the Northern Gateway Project, marine safety and pipeline integrity for that project makes the probability extremely, extremely remote," said Roth.


UN declares clean water a 'fundamental human right'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10797988
28 July 2010 Last updated at 19:43 ET

For more information see:
Stop Enbridge (BP North) Oilsands Northern Pipeline and SuperTankers to Hell Gateway into SuperNatural B.C.
http://floodiceorfire.wordpress.com/stop-enbridge-bp-north-oilsands-northern-pipeline-and-supertankers-to-hell-gateway-into-supernatural-b-c/

Open Letter Enbridge (BP North) CEO Pat Daniel Bulldozing Your Way from Alberta Tarsands to BC Coast We are Rachel Corrie
http://floodiceorfire.wordpress.com/open-letter-enbridge-bp-north-ceo-pat-daniel-bulldozing-your-way-from-alberta-tarsands-to-bc-coast-we-are-rachel-corrie/

Flyer Info Stop Enbridge Northern Alberta Tar Sands Pipeline and Supertankers to SuperNatural B.C. Pacific Coast
http://floodiceorfire.wordpress.com/flyer-info-stop-enbridge-northern-alberta-tar-sands-pipeline-and-supertankers-to-supernatural-b-c-pacific-coast/

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